[b-hebrew] MT pronunciation - a few observations
Uri Hurwitz
uhurwitz at yahoo.com
Tue Jun 24 19:37:21 EDT 2008
It may be useful to keep in mind that the discussion about
pronunciation
of words in BH refers only to the written texts as they
came down to us.
However, one should not forget the obvious, namely
that up to a certain point
actual people spoke the languages which they
wrote down. In the case of
the MT we know that it ceased to be spoken
quite a few centuries before
the Masoretes codified the texts. BH had
been replaced long before with
Mishnaic Hebrew and mostly with Aramaic.
Of course there had been different versions before. But when
viewed from certain perspectives, the similarity of the DSS and the LXX
to the
MT are remarkable. Despite thousands of important textual
differences, and abundance of variations, there are hardly any
differences in the
historical narrartives, for instance. Further, the
text of biblical quotations
in the Mishnah, codified ciraca 200 CE, is the consonantal text of the MT which followed more than half a milleneum later.
It is common knowledge that pronunciation changes with time, but
not always. There are some remarkable features of the MT vocalization
which deserve renewed attention:
In addition to earlier vowel markings in Akkadian
and in Arabic which employ
only three vowels: A , U, I , the MT does
present E as in the Seghol or
Tsere and Hataf- Seghol. There is no
reason to doubt that such vowel
existed in the ordinary pronunciation
of people, as it
exists in colloquial Arabic. ( This is
why the English reader may be confused by variant transliterations of
the article "Al-..." or "El..." as in the name "Al-Arish" or "El-Arish.")
Interestingly the MT preserved some ancient forms of declensions - such
as "kalbi" or "malki" that may have preserved the way they
had been pronounced thousands of years earlier. This despite the fact
they are derived
from the Segholite KeLeV or MeLeKh. But even such
nouns, in their standard M plural preserved ancient plural form in the
long Kamatz under the middle consonant, before the regular "...IM"
ending, thus emplying really a double dual.
However, the very opposite happened in other cases. In the personal
name Shimshon, it is the LXX translation which preserved the original " A"
in the first vowel, rather than the later "I" in the MT. Compare to the Arabic "Shams" for sun.
Such an example demonstrates the internal changes
which
occurred in pronunciation of written words between the Hellenistic period
when
the LXX was composed, and the time of the Masoretes centuries later.
Uri Hurwitz Wilmington Vt
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